Why use 2015 as the historical comparison year for inventory instead of 2019?

Mostly data availability, and never a claim that 2015 is the one true baseline. The inventory data we lean on comes from HousingWire, which frames its historical context against 2015, and getting clean, seasonally aligned inventory series for other benchmark years is genuinely hard unless you maintain your own dataset. So we use the comparison the source makes consistent week to week. There's a logic to 2015 as well. The 2008 bust ran ugly through roughly 2011, and 2012 through 2015 was the climb back, so 2015 represents a market that had normalized after the crash. You're right that plenty of people prefer 2019 as the last normal pre-COVID year, and that's fair. The 2015 through 2019 stretch was a run of reasonably similar, non-frenzied years, so either works as a sane reference point. We default to 2015 simply because the apples-to-apples series is what our source publishes. For scale, national active inventory sat around 1.68 million homes in 2015 per that HousingWire data, and recent years have generally run well below that benchmark. The exact gap moves constantly, so check the latest reading rather than anchoring to a fixed percentage. The useful point is less about the specific year and more that supply gets measured against a normalized pre-pandemic level, and it has mostly come up short of it.